Remember how upset some librarians got when the word “scrotum” appeared on the first page of the 2007 Newbery Medal winner www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/? I wonder what they’re going say to when they find out that the hero of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian says that he belongs to “the tribe of chronic masturbators.”

Alexie’s novel won National Book Award for Young People’s Literature on Wednesday, so it’s safe to say that it will also receive consideration for the Newbery that the American Library Association www.ala.org will hand out in January. I’ll review the book in the next week or so (along with Daughter of York, originally scheduled for this week).

Until then librarians who want to check out that “good part” can do it by going to the listing for the novel on Amazon www.amazon.com and using the “Search Inside This Book” tool to search for “tribe of chronic masturbators,” which appears on page 217. [Note: All you teenage boys who found this site by searching for “scrotum” or “masturbation,” go back to your Social Studies. That page number was a public service for librarians.]

Oh, am I going to have fun reviewing this book! Please bookmark this site or subscribe to the RSS feed if you’d like to read my comments.

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Once school libraries get these books, the same parents who’ve spent a fair portion of their lives trying to get the Harry Potter books banned will be back in force as soon as they hear about that “tribe” phrase. Visualizing the headlines in advance, I see:

Thanks, Amanda. I look forward to your comments, too. One thing I hope to deal with in my review is that “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” was up against “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” which I know well after having posted a readers’ guide to it.

I’d love to know what people who have read both books (or other finalists) think about the National Book Award. My views on that would have appeared here on Saturday if I hadn’t needed to do some Thanksgiving books, which so many parents are looking for.

Last year I did a post on the best versions of the Nativity story for children, and no matter what else I wrote about it, it was the No. 1 post day after day …
Jan

Guess what – “boner” is used multiple times as well (pages 96, 97, 98, and 190). I finished the book a couple days ago, and hope to read “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” once fall classes are over and the current children’s lit students no longer need access to it.